


The Promises We Wish We Could Keep

by lilypond3



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Ben gets one line but he's still my favorite loser, Homophobia, M/M, Maggie Tozier POV, OC violence, Richie has good parents!, but don't worry it's also sad at the end, excessive crying, it's sad in the beginning, it's self-indulgent deal with it, sad in the middle too, this is honestly just me writing supportive toziers and reddie from their perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:21:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilypond3/pseuds/lilypond3
Summary: Her son is 16 when Maggie Tozier can't ignore the signs anymore. She was being selfish, she realizes, and she hates herself for it the day Richie comes home with a black eye and a split lip and a note from the principal that she has to sign to acknowledge the “incident” that left her son with a busted face.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Maggie Tozier/Wentworth Tozier
Comments: 12
Kudos: 104





	The Promises We Wish We Could Keep

**Author's Note:**

> I've been kicking around this idea in my head for a little while, it's basically my hc for why the Toziers leave Derry. Maggie and Went are good parents who don't always do the right thing, but they love their son. I guess it can be classified as a Mother's Day Fic in honor of Mags, the best Loser mom, even if it's a few days late.

Her son is 16 when Maggie Tozier can't ignore the signs anymore. Part of her has always known, has seen the way his smile changes and his eyes light up around his best friend in a way they don’t around any girl, has found the stash of Sports Illustrated he hides under his mattress (college basketball edition, not swimsuit), has heard the rumors about her son that have been scratched into bathroom walls at the high school then passed around town with dirty looks and sneers of disgust. She always wrote it off as nasty teenagers picking on the kid who dared to be himself, with his loud mouth and louder fashion sense, but looking back on it, Maggie knows she ignored the whispers around town because she was desperate to believe they weren’t true. Not because she’s disgusted or disappointed, but because she’s terrified for her boy.

She was being selfish, she realizes, and she hates herself for it the day Richie comes home with a black eye and a split lip and a note from the principal that she has to sign to acknowledge the “incident” that left her son with a busted face. The other boy, the principal assures in his letter, has had a stern talking to and will be suspended for two days for brutalizing her son, as if that is justice, as if that will make her feel less nauseous at the thought of sending Richie back into that school tomorrow or ever again. She wonders if the other boy’s mother will be upset with her son’s violence, or if the slurs he used against his victim will justify him in her eyes, and her nausea intensifies.

Richie is running back out the front door as fast as he came in, shouting about how his friends are waiting and ignoring her shouting back, demanding he stay right where he is, and she winces at her own voice. She didn’t mean for it to sound like she was angry with him, she’s just overwhelmed by the fear and heartbreak and fury that’s roaring through her as she grips the letter so hard it nearly tears. She wants to scream, at the boy who hurt her son, at the principal for doing so little to protect him, but mostly at herself, because that’s supposed to be her job, isn’t it? Protecting him? Her most important job, and she’s failing so horribly she could rip herself to shreds, but she settles for the letter.

Maggie calls her husband at work and cuts off his sweet greeting to tell him he needs to come home immediately. Maybe it’s the fact that she has never in over 20 years of marriage made a phone call like this or maybe he can hear how the tears beginning to well in her eyes have choked her voice, but all he says is “I’m on my way” before hanging up, and she doesn’t want to know how fast he drove to be screeching into the driveway and barreling through the front door less than five minutes later.

“Mags? Maggie, dear, what’s going on?” He’s frantic, but she would be too if she was called home in the middle of the afternoon to find her spouse crying on the kitchen floor. “Jesus, are you hurt? What’s-”

“Call a realtor,” she manages to say at last. “Call a fucking realtor right now, Went, we are taking our son and getting as far away from this fucking town as we can, I mean it-”

“Maggie,” his voice, still panicked but strong and attempting reassurance, cuts through her rambling. “What are you talking about? What the hell happened?”

She shoves the ribbons of the letter into his hands. “He’s not safe here,” she says, trying to breathe through her hiccoughing sobs. “This town is full of bigots, and violent ones, and we should have taken him away from here _years_ ago.”

He’s trying to put the shreds of paper back together like a puzzle but Maggie did a thorough job of destroying it and he’s still lost without the context of his wife’s words. “Maggie, what-”

“Some asshole attacked our son at school today,” she seethes. “Called him a fag and busted up his face, and that bullshit fucking principal isn’t doing shit about it! I’m not sending him back to a school where assault is punished with a fucking two-day suspension, I’m not fucking doing it, Went.”

“Okay,” he says, brushing her hair off her face and thumbing the tears from her cheeks. His voice is steady and soothing, but Maggie has known her husband for more than half her life and she can tell when he’s distraught and trying to hide it for her sake. “Okay, so we’ll call the school, or- no, we’ll go down there ourselves and talk to the principal and make sure this never happens again, but Mags, it’s high school. Kids get beat up, it’s not a reason to uproot our whole lives and move.”

Maggie shoves him away, looking at him in disbelief as her rage reaches new heights. “Your son is beaten bloody at school, and that’s all you have to say? _‘Kids get beat up’_?” she all but screams in his face. He opens his mouth to respond, but she holds up a shaking hand. “No, shut up, I don’t want to hear any ‘boys will be boys’ bullshit right now. This is fucking unacceptable in any context, but do you not realize that this isn’t just high school bullying? It’s a fucking hate crime, Wentworth! If this hadn’t happened at school where adults were legally required to stop it, who knows what could have happened!”

“Maggie,” he says, voice soft but warning.

“We can’t pretend we don’t see it anymore,” she says. She’s still burning with anger, but the anguish and fear are rising quickly to the surface again. “Our son is gay, Went, and it’s dangerous for him to be here.”

The silence drags on between them for several moments before Went speaks again. “It’s dangerous for him everywhere, Mags.”

“Don’t sit there and tell me Derry is just as bad as everywhere else, you know this town is fucking poisonous,” she spits. She knows she’s taking out her feelings on her husband, but he doesn’t seem to realize the seriousness of the situation that they’re in. “There are more slurs and death threats painted across Derry infrastructure than there are buildings! A black eye is just the beginning. I’m not sitting around here and waiting for the day a police officer comes knocking on our door to tell me my baby is dead.”

She chokes on the last word, hands flying up to her mouth to muffle her sobs. Went pulls her tightly to his chest, and she doesn’t push him away this time. He holds her face to his shoulder as she cries, rubbing her back and murmuring reassurances under his breath. When she pulls away, his face is wet with his own tears.

“Where’s Richie?” he asks, voice rough as his fingers swipe under his glasses.

“He said he was going to meet some friends,” she says with a sniffle. “I’m not sure who, he ran out of here so fast I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”

“Okay. Okay, I’m-” he starts. He takes a deep breath before beginning again. “I’m going to make some phone calls to work, you see if you can find the number for that real estate company the Denbroughs used in the phone book. Zach said they were great.”

Maggie nods and lets Went pull her to her feet, already turning to hunt down the phone book when he stops her with a hand on her arm and pulls her gently into a hug. She wraps her arms tightly around him in return, and they stand there holding each other for a long minute before Went kisses her temple and says, “We’ll get him out of here as soon as we can, I promise. Those friends of his will watch out for him in the meantime, yeah?”

She wants to say _No, that’s our job_ , but he’s right. Richie barely comes home to sleep and eat these days, always running off to be with his pack of friends. They’re all such good boys, and there’s an intensity to their friendship that Maggie’s only known with her family. Richie would do anything for them, and she’s confident that they would do anything for him, too. She remembers how sad and lost they all were when the Denbroughs moved away a few years ago, and it breaks her heart to have to take Richie from them now, but they’ll have a phone wherever they go. Richie can call or write or do whatever it takes to keep in touch with them. She’ll make sure Richie can hold on to the people most important in his life, especially since she’s the one that’s forcing them apart.

Thirty minutes later and Went is still on the phone with whatever colleague. Maggie left the phonebook open on his desk to the page with information on the real estate company he mentioned circled in bright red ink, and has since found herself drifting into her son’s bedroom. She sits on the edge of his bed, scoping out a room that at some point went from belonging to her little boy to belonging to a young man. The drawings of superheroes on the walls have been replaced with band posters, the toys that used to trip her on the floor are now dirty clothes and cassette tapes.

He has a few photos wedged into the frame of his mirror, all of his friends at different ages. There are a few recent polaroids, featuring teenaged hijinks and the latest additions to their friend group. As the pictures get older, the number of subjects whittles down to just the boys Maggie is most familiar with, the ones Richie has known nearly all his life. She smiles at the photo of the four of them on the first day of third grade, all huddled together at the bus stop and showing off gap-toothed smiles. Richie has his arms slung around little Stan Uris and Eddie Kaspbrak on either side of him, his hand reaching to ruffle Bill’s hair on the other side of Stan. She remembers taking this picture, so she remembers the way Bill playfully swatted his hand away from his head immediately after it was taken with a high pitched “Hey!”, but his pretend annoyance was no match for his beaming grin.

Her eyes fall on a picture tucked into the bottom corner of his mirror, half-hidden behind the clutter on his dresser. She gets up to take a closer look and realizes that the novelty playing cards and glob of melted-together army men concealing the photo are likely not an accident, that they’ve been arranged to hide it from the passing glance of a guest without completely covering it from Richie’s knowing view. It’s another polaroid, this one recent enough to feature the horrible shirt Richie came home with after his 16th birthday party over on the Hanlon farm. Maggie remembers all five boys stumbling into her home the next day, laughing and shoving one another with the affectionate aggression that seems to come hardwired in every teenage boy. Richie was wearing the new shirt, an eye-watering bright purple garment patterned with inexplicably green flamingos, and Maggie had covered her eyes and gasped dramatically.

“My eyes!” she cried. “Richie, that horrible shirt! It’s blinded me!”

Richie laughed. “You like it, Ma?” he said, and she could hear his shit-eating grin without having to uncover her eyes. “Eds Spagheds got it for me, ain’t he a doll?”

When she looked again, Richie had a struggling Eddie pulled tight to his side, the hand not wrapped around his shoulders pinching his cheek.

“Oh, not you, Eddie!” Maggie said, giving her son’s best friend her most betrayed look. “And here I thought I could trust you.”

“It was supposed to be a joke!” Eddie had finally managed to wrestle away from Richie’s tight embrace but didn’t move out from under his arm entirely. He looked up at Richie with a pinched brow, but he was fighting a losing battle to keep the smile off his face. “I should’ve known your bad taste has no limits.”

“Funny, neither does your mom,” Richie shot back, kicking off the back and forth squabble that followed the boys all the way up to Richie’s room.

The shirt became a favorite of Richie’s, a frequent flyer in his laundry that Maggie only restrained herself from “losing” with the memory of Richie’s smile and Eddie’s poorly hidden pride whenever he wore it. It’s been the most popular item in Richie’s wardrobe the last few months, so there’s no way to tell when exactly the picture was taken. Richie has one arm extended from where he’s holding the camera, aiming it back at himself and Eddie, who’s tucked snuggly if begrudgingly under his arm. Richie’s grinning widely at the camera, and Eddie wears the same expression he was wearing when Maggie first met this eyesore of a shirt. He’s looking at Richie with a face that’s trying to scowl, but half of his mouth has already turned up in a smile and there’s no mistaking the fondness in his eyes.

“I hope he doesn’t take it too hard,” Went says from behind her, making Maggie jump. She hadn’t heard him come into the room. He’s looking at the same picture with a sad smile, a strange mixture of love and grief in his eyes.

“Which one?” she says, leaning her back against his chest and tucking her head against his shoulder.

“Both.”

Maggie hums in agreement, but her eyes burn with fresh tears. She wishes she could pack Eddie away and take him with them, take him from this awful town and his awful mother to a place where he and Richie would be safe and happy. She knows Richie will miss all of his friends, but Eddie is different. It will be like he’s missing part of himself.

“It’s gonna break his heart to leave him,” Went says, pained words echoing her thoughts.

“If things were different...” she starts, but she has to clarify. “If _Derry_ were different, it would have been nice to see them work it out.”

He wraps his arms tighter around her middle. “Who knows? Maybe someday...”

Maybe someday they’ll find each other again. Maybe someday the world will be kinder. Maybe someday they’ll get a real chance to work it out together.

“Yeah,” Maggie sighs. “Yeah, I sure hope so.”

\---

For someone who’s been counting the days until he can graduate and ‘get the fuck out of Derry,’ Richie is angrier than she’s ever seen him when they tell him about their plan to move. That record is quickly broken, however, when she begins to explain herself. Maggie has no idea how to handle a situation like this tactfully. She does her best, but the mere suggestion of their true motivations to move makes the color drain so fast from Richie’s face she’s afraid he’ll pass out, and then just as quickly he’s bright red and on his feet, screaming that he doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about and that they can stop pretending like they know a single fucking thing about him if they think leaving Derry is what’s best for him. Then he storms out the door and doesn’t come home for two days.

She gets off the phone with Stan, who called 15 minutes after Richie left to let her know he was at his house and would be staying there for a little while so she shouldn’t worry (because that boy is more grown up than most of the adults she knows), and turns to her husband.

“So I guess we won’t talk about it?” she says, completely lost in this new field of parenting. “Let him come to us when he’s ready?”

“If we want to avoid his spontaneous combustion, that might be best,” he says with an equally lost expression.

Maggie sighs, her eyes shifting to the framed family portrait on the wall. It’s a few years out of date, since convincing Richie to get dressed up and sit still for a photo became an impossible task once he hit teenhood. Puberty has stretched him out tall and sharpened his features, but Maggie can sometimes still see that little boy with round cheeks and big curious eyes and a gap-toothed smile when she looks at the handsome young man he’s become. She’s overwhelmed suddenly with how much she loves him, how she would give anything for him to be happy.

“I just hope we’re doing right by him,” she says to her husband. He reaches out to grab her hand on the counter.

“We’re doing the best we can.”

\---

It takes a shockingly short time to sell the house, and Went’s partner at his practice happens to have a friend from dental school out in Los Angeles who’s looking to hire, and they find a modest house in a nice neighborhood near the practice that’s miraculously within their budget. It’s almost like Derry’s as desperate for them to leave as they are, which is the one favor this town has ever done their family. Before they know it, their lives are packed into boxes and shipped to the west coast and it’s time to say goodbye to the house and the town where they’ve spent the last 20 years.

Richie’s friends come to see him off, and Maggie and Went pretend to load the last bags into the car while they watch their son. The boys are smiling and joking around, threatening to fly out to California just to kick Richie’s ass if he doesn’t call every once in a while, at least, but their eyes are all a little too watery for the mood to be as jovial as they pretend.

“Rich, we gotta get going soon,” Went reluctantly calls to his son. “We don’t want to miss our flight.”

The boys go quiet now that the time’s come to say goodbye. Ben Hanscom, perhaps the sweetest boy Maggie has ever had the delight to know, is the first to let the tears breach from his eyes.

“Aw, you gonna miss me, Haystack?” Richie teases, barely holding back his own tears.

Ben makes no attempt to stop his crying, just looks at him with the most sincere expression of sadness and squeaks more than says, “Yes.”

It sets the rest of them off. They’re all crying as Richie dives at Ben and pulls him into a tight hug. “Yeah, I’m gonna miss you, too, buddy.”

Mike’s next, crushing Richie into him with his strong farm boy arms hard enough to squeeze the air from his lungs. “Don’t forget us when you’re rich and famous in Hollywood, Trashmouth,” he says.

“How could I when I got these fancy new cracked ribs to remind me?” Richie jokes but hugs him back just as hard.

“Try not to fall off any cliffs or get eaten by sharks while you’re over there,” Stan says when it’s his turn to say goodbye. The effect of his deadpan teasing is lost in the sob that interrupts him halfway through.

“Oh Staniel, what’ll I do without my level head?” Richie croons, ruffling Stan’s curls. Stan, who’s always had the lowest tolerance for Richie’s teasing, doesn’t bat his hand away like Maggie’s seen him do countless times. Instead, he throws his arms around Richie’s neck and pulls him close.

“You’ll be dead in a week,” he says, sniffling through his watery smile.

Richie hesitates before turning to face Eddie. Maggie can’t see his face, but if the look of complete misery on Eddie’s is anything to go by, she’d rather not try to picture it. The smaller boy has his arms wrapped tight around his own chest as if the pieces of him are on the verge of falling apart and he has to hold it all together. He’s looking down at Richie’s shoes instead of at his face, biting his lip as tears drip past his chin.

Richie kicks out one of his watched feet at Eddie, scuffing the toes of their sneakers together. “Hey,” he says. Eddie looks up, and if Maggie’s heart is breaking, she hates to imagine how her son is feeling. But he puts on a Judy Garland impression and says, “I think I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow.”

That gets Eddie to crack a smile, just barely, before launching himself at Richie. “You’re the one without a brain, dingus.” He buries his face in Richie’s neck and says something else, but it’s too muffled for Maggie to hear.

“You kidding?” Richie says, tone teasing but his voice is choked as he cries. “I’m gonna call so much, you’ll get sick of me.”

Eddie just shakes his head, rubbing his face into Richie, and says something that sounds a lot like _Never_.

Maggie wishes again that things were different, that they could stay here or that Eddie could come with them and that she didn’t have to be the one to pull these boys apart. It’s not fair that she has to break her son’s heart to protect his life.

There are more tears and more assurances to keep in touch, and the four boys lean on each other heavily and watch from what used to be the Toziers’ driveway as the car pulls away. Maggie watches her son in the rearview mirror, his neck craned to catch the last glimpse of his best friends as they disappear behind the turned corner before he slumps in his seat, wiping his tears and snot with the sleeves of his sweatshirt. In her head, she promises herself and her son that this will not be the last time he sees them, that this move will not mark the end of their friendship, that they will still be best friends over the phone and through letters on opposite sides of the country, and that someday, when he’s ready, Maggie will wrap her son up as tight as she can and tell him over and over how much she loves him and how proud of him she is and how nothing, especially not the love in his own heart, could ever change that.

But she’s already forgotten the details of their faces by the time they’re checking their bags in Bangor, and she can barely recall their names when they’ve touched down in LA. When people ask why they moved across the country, she tells them they just needed a change of pace, and she forgets the finer details of the true story before she forgets it all together and believes her own lie to be the truth. Her family adjusts to their new life in California: Went settles in at work, barely remembering the man he worked with for 15 years who set him up with the position; Richie makes a few friends at school, and if he’s lonely, neither he nor his mother link it to the boys back in Maine waiting for him to call; Maggie busies herself with arranging the items of their old life to fit into their new home, emptying boxes even as she tries and fails to remember quite how they organized the framed photos on the wall of their last home.

When she’s unpacking the boxes of her clothes, she finds one of Richie’s that got mixed in with hers in the shuffle. Ignoring a small part of her brain that cries out in protest, she swipes a particularly hideous purple and green flamingo shirt from the top of the box and tosses it into the pile of boxes and garbage that’s accumulated while she unpacked. It’ll be hard enough to make friends at his new school, she reasons with herself. No need to make it any harder with such a garish look. She takes the rest of the clothes in the box to Richie's room and leaves it on his bed, pretending not to see the magazines that peek out from under the mattress.

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure: I have no idea how high school discipline works as I was the biggest goody two shoes in high school, nor do I understand real estate.
> 
> Also I'm very nervous that I stole the Scarecrow bit from another reddie fic because I've read so much of it in the last 5 months that I often confuse my own thoughts with things that others have already written, so if I stole it from you I'm sorry! Your bit was so good it camped out in my brain and made a home there.


End file.
